What are the decrees of God?

He begins here entirely with God, His thoughts and His counsels, not with what man is. We may lay hold of the truth, so to speak, by one or the other of two ends — by that of the sinner's condition in connection with man's responsibility, or by that of the thoughts and eternal counsels of God in view of His own glory. The latter is that side of the truth on which the Spirit here makes us look. Even redemption, all glorious as it is in itself, is consigned to the second place, as the means by which we enjoy the effect of God's counsels.

Here was a kind of wisdom altogether new; a thing outside the world, hitherto shut up in the mind of God, hid in Himself so that there was no promise or prophecy of it, but the special object of His eternal purpose; connected in a peculiar way with the One who is the centre and the fulness of the mystery of godliness.

I do not doubt that God's purposes are in their nature eternal, and He purposed the mystery in Christ Jesus.

In the Bible there are three distinct objects about which God has a purpose: first, the material world and man in general; secondly, Israel, as a chief and special people on and for the earth; and thirdly, the saints destined for heaven, including the church, of which Christ is the Head, and which is also the habitation of God by the Spirit. These are three different lines, yet connected, and converging to one point.

There we learn His purpose before the world was made to manifest Himself, not only as a God that can create, and judge or destroy, but also as a God that can save. ... Every doctrine contained in it, every fact therein recorded, each and all are subservient to this one great unchanging purpose. God will be a Saviour-God.

In eternity, when the new heavens and the new earth shall have been created, when Christ shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, that God may be all in all ... then will the full and blessed accomplishment of His eternal counsel be celebrated, and there will be an intelligent and redeemed creation chanting the praises and the glories of a Saviour-God. A word was sufficient to create; but to make a sinful yet an intelligent and responsible creature a worshipper, required the work and the blood of His own Son.

Election is to fitness for His presence in a nature like His own. Predestination is to a relationship, as like as possible to His Son's. But scripture carefully excludes any such human inference as God's predestination to hell fire. ... Their own sins fitted those vessels of wrath to destruction.

But at a time of utter evil it suited God to divulge the secret of His purpose. From before the foundation of the world He chose us Christians, in Christ, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love. He would surround Himself above with beings like Himself: holy in nature, blameless in ways; and love, their animating principle as it is His own.

There is no such thing set forth in scripture as any decree of God consigning a certain number of the human race to eternal damnation. Some may be judicially given over to blindness because of deliberate rejection of the light. ... All who perish will have only themselves to blame. All who reach heaven will have to thank God.

In speaking of the "vessels of wrath," He says "fitted to destruction" — fitted not by God surely, but by themselves. On the other hand, when He speaks of the "vessels of mercy," he says, "which He had afore prepared to glory." The grand truth of election is fully established; the repulsive error of reprobation, sedulously avoided.

Is it likely that God will tell us, who are but His creatures, the motives that underlie His decrees? If He did explain, would our finite minds be able to grasp the explanation? We may rest assured that all His decrees are in perfect harmony with the fact that "God is light" and "God is love."

Does a sinner wish to insinuate that he is very anxious to believe, but that God will not give him ability to do so because of certain fatalistic decrees? Tell him plainly it is not true. He is leaving sober fact for the nightmare of fallen reason.

Man is always held for a responsible being, and is judged and condemned for his own sins, and not by any predetermined decree of God.

In the case of the wicked, so far from being elected to eternal misery, we find that God endures them — vessels of wrath — with much longsuffering, fitted not by Him but by their own deeds for destruction. The word Katartizo means to correct, repair, mend; then in its participial form fitted, prepared. The word does not suppose a decree of God, but a work of man.

God had purposed in eternal counsel the blessing of Gentiles on an equal basis with Jews, as it is this day. ... These chapters are of utmost importance to a right understanding of prophecy and all God's dispensational ways.

After all, these are matters which lie beyond the reach of finite minds. Is it likely that God would reveal to us such secrets of His high and eternal counsels as must lie on the plane of infinity? If He did, should we be any the wiser? No! It is well for us to call a halt here and say with the Psalmist, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me: it is high, I cannot attain to it."